By Cindy Wiggins Tapia
I layered on three pairs of panties and two pairs of shorts under bell-bottom pants, three tops, and stuffed my hard straw pockerbook with Kotex and bounced out of Btown with a hippie whose sole ambition in life was to become a 1%er in the Hells Angels.
Nightfall found us hitchhiking down 365. Two men in a white tank pulled over. We hopped in without thought of rippers and rapists.
The driver took one look at Charlie’s long hair and exclaimed, “I know where to take ya’ll!”
He let us out on 14th Street in Hotlanta. A street cop sheltered us for the night and left a cheeseburger for us to share at breakfast. Later that morning, we rented a room in a block-long hotel turned boarding house on 10th Street.
“How old are you?” The landlady asked.
“Eighteen.”
“She don’t look more’n twelve!” Her husband remarked.
I was incensed. There I was two months past my fourteenth birthday, and he thought I looked two years younger!
Charlie forked over our hoard of money—all five dollars of it—with a promise to pay the rest later. The minute I walked into our room, I heard Mama crying, “Cindy! Cindy!” all the way from Buford.
We sat on the bed, and Charlie turned on his transistor radio.
A DJ called out my name and particulars. “She’s thirteen years old.”
“Well, I’m fourteen, they won’t recognize me.”
We got into a big fight because I wouldn’t let him open my pockerbook. I was mortified. No way in Hoboken was I going to let him eyeball my Kotex.
In the morning, we strolled into a head shop and picked up a free bundle of the counterculture underground Democratic newspaper The Great Speckled Bird. I stood beside Charlie in the middle of 10th Street while he hawked the far-left rag for 25 cents a pop.
A lady and her pity-filled face stopped and said, “You poor thing!” I gave her the stink eye.
We made enough money to buy tomato and lettuce sandwiches and milk, with two dimes left to stash toward a Harley-Davidson hawg. On the streets again, an old bum took Charlie aside. They had words and Charlie walked back to me.
“What’d he want?”
“He wanted to buy you.”
He kept me off the street after that. He sold newspapers, while I slept behind a hook and eye latch. It never occurred to me that he might split.
Our last night, he banged on the door.
“Cindy! Let me in! There‘s a pig out here!”
I opened the door and in walked a teenage boy from Buford High School who worked undercover for the Gwinnett Co. Police Department. He took us down to an unmarked car. where his adult partner was waiting in the driver’s seat.
As we headed back to Buford, he said, “Danny Sexton died.”
I arrived home on Moreno Avenue to a full house and a tray of hamburgers that Danny Anglin had sent over from Teen’s Diner. After consuming little food in 48 hours, I was starving, I sat down at the kitchen table and devoured one burger after another, and I haven’t stopped eating since.
